Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in GermanyBruce Nauman: Dream Passage

The Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof's summer show, Bruce Nauman: Dream Passage is the first major exhibition of the American artist Bruce Nauman in Berlin. The exhibition is being held on the occasion of the installation of the architectural sculpture Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care from 1984, which was recently donated to the Nationalgalerie by the collector Friedrich Christian Flick. Thus the largest interior sculpture by the artist can now be exhibited in a permanent space, accompanying Double Cage Piece (1974), which has been exhibited in the exterior space of the Hamburger Bahnhof since 2005, and also comes from the donation by the collector. The sculpture is made of three intersecting corridors, and can be entered; it is the high point of a series of works called Dream Passage which was inspired by a dream of the artist.

Explicit political connotations have been a major focus of Nauman’s work since the beginning of the 1980s, for example, in sculptures where hanging metal chairs are used – like Musical Chair from 1983 – illustrating the artist’s critique of torture and violence used in totalitarian regimes. Complex neon works like American Violence, 1981-82 or Sex and Death / Double 69, 1985 for their part explore the connections between sex, violence and death.

On the occasion of the exhibition Dream Passage, further works by Bruce Nauman are on display in the Rieckhallen of Hamburger Bahnhof; here they enter into dialogue with works from the museum’s collections by the artist’s contemporaries, like Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Richard Jackson or Nikolaus Lang and younger artists like Absalon and Manfred Pernice.